I mean technically Jesus is a human embodiment of God (according to the Council of Nicaea) so he is both himself and his Son. That whole story is a mindfuck and a logical nightmare. Right up there with the Tower of Babel when it comes to "What the fuck is this omnipotent, omniscient being fucking doing up there?!"
According to Nicea and the Christian tradition, there is one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Jesus is the Son incarnate, but not the Father. You may not think this makes sense, and that's fine, but it is quite different from what you are claiming above.
>>I mean technically Jesus is a human embodiment of God (according to the Council of Nicaea) so he is both himself and his Son.
I'll just assume it was my pronouns that got ya on this one. God is Jesus. God is God (or Father God, or Allah, or I Am, or whatever your preferred term for the overbeing is) "he(God) is both himself (Father God) and his son (Jesus)"
Wow that is a misleading argument. Wave particle duality is not a logical nightmare. It might be to someone who only has an extremely superficial understanding of it, but the more you dig into the topic, it becomes easier to understand.
There is no analogue to this in christianity. You just have to accept it as mysterious, and then you claim that if there weren't such mysteries, it would seem fake. That's a rationalization. There is no logical reason for there needing to be mysteries to god. You need there to be one because in the reality of your beliefs there are mysteries.
I mean religion as a whole smells like a fabrication, but that's just me. I never said anything about truth or not in my previous statement, just that it's a logical nightmare, which you're admitting it is.
I'm a logician and I wouldn't call those stories a "logical nightmare". I'd even go so far as to say they have a profound deep inner logic.
It's a bit arrogant, given a book which alleges to reveal divine secrets of reality, to assume said book should all be perfectly intuitive and easy to understand. "Sacred Hidden Truths for Dummies"? :)
Think of it this way. Imaging you're immortal, and you're going to go to a deserted island for all eternity, and you can take one book with you. Suppose you want to maximize the probability that the one book you take with you will provide you value as long as possible.
You could take a practical book about how to survive on a desert island. But, since you're gonna live forever, everything in there is stuff you could figure out on your own eventually. So this book's value is only short-term.
You could take a new age book with lots of feel-good, intuitively-pleasing platitudes. But, again, you could just invent all that by yourself. Probability of eternal-term value: 0.
A collection of stories like the ones in question at least has some chance of providing eternal-term value, precisely BECAUSE on the short-term they seem so absurd. If they were intuitively pleasing at first glance, then you could just come up with them yourself eventually. This same reasoning would apply to any similar collection of stories, but the stories in question at least have a lot of precedent / test-of-time / reputable endorsements.
I'll take a stab at answering this in a different way.
I think the pride comes in assuming that the being that created the book is exactly like yourself. That assumption is egocentric.
That the nature of the being who created this universe is complex, and isn't exactly like us, shouldn't be that surprising. Any being capable of such things would surely be different from us in some material way. When that being describes himself, and those descriptions do not line up with our expectations, thats ok. He doesn't exist inside the confines of the universe he created and that we live in, and is not bounded by it or its rules.
The gospel isn't, on the whole, that complicated. All mankind are sinners. The consequence of sin is death. The way to be saved from death is to accept a divine gift. To accept the gift, you need to acknowledge your sin, accept that the giver exists and that the gift exists, and ask for it. There are further details and surprising depth and beauty, but the basics are very simple.
Some lessons are easier learned through parables/fables/stories than through direct teaching. That's especially true for children. I can tell my little daughter the story of "the boy who cried wolf", or "the dog that bit the hand that fed it", and that'll be a lot more effective than if I try to directly teach her the underlying lessons without the emotional stories attached to them.
If a higher power would try to teach me some lessons, I assume (by analogy) that those lessons would similarly come in the form of stories or parables etc. Just like my daughter understands my teachings better in that form, I assume I would understand a higher power's teachings better in that form.
If a book claims to be inspired by a higher power, and I read it and everything looks immediately feel-good intuitive/logical on the surface, than I'm going to reject it, saying: "I could have written that myself!"
> Jesus is a human embodiment of God (according to the Council of Nicaea) so he is both himself and his Son.
What you've described is called "modalism" (aka "Sabellianism", after a guy named Sabellius) and is taught against in Scripture and rejected by the Church under all non-cultish denominational flags. The doctrine of the Trinity is difficult to "wrap your arms around" but very easy to state:
1. The Father is God.
2. The Son is God.
3. The Holy Spirit is God.
4. The Father is not the Son.
5. The Son is not the Holy Spirit.
6. The Holy Spirit is not the Father.
7. There is one God.
From this the language of the Trinity (1 being, God, who consists of 3 persons, the Father, Son, and Spirit) was developed by the Church to describe what is taught in Scripture.
The logical fallacies of the Bible are only a problem if you expect the Bible to be logical, to possess a singular coherent narrative, or feel it must be taken literally. It's much easier to tolerate if you take it for what it is, an anthology of ancient mythology and poetry.
And then there's the Messiah going around saying we are all 'children of God'. So how is he different? Either he's the only son, or we're all daughters and sons, can't have it both ways. So when any of us sacrifice ourselves for others, we've done exactly as significant a sacrifice as the famous one. Or more so - because when we die, its permanent and not a sort of symbolic dying where you get to walk around and talk with your buds again for days.
Jesus would be the first born, and has preeminence (https://www.blueletterbible.org/faq/don_stewart/don_stewart_...). Christians, when they enter into the family of God are adopted (in the roman sense). Jesus is different because He is God, because He was first, because when He lived on this earth He did no sin and thus when He died his sacrifice was sufficient for sins that were not His own, and because He was God, His sacrifice was sufficient for the sins of all mankind. Our deaths must atone for our own sins and can't be applied to another. According to Christian doctrine, our deaths are not permanent, as all people will be resurrected, either to live with God or to suffer punishment for rejecting Him.
